Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938

Introduction

Reconsidering Red Vienna

On Election Day in April 1927, the conservative Viennese newspaper Die Reichspost featured Chancellor Ignaz Seipel’s final political announcement to Austrian voters on its front page. Seipel called on the Austrian people to vote for the Einheitsliste, the antisocialist coalition of bourgeois parties, in order to counteract the nefarious intentions of the Austrian Social Democrats: The victory of the Einheitsliste will guard the Austrian people against the greatest evils. It will hinder the superfluous and harmful tension that still exists between Red Vienna and the other provinces. It will mean that Austria will not appear to a disapproving world as a domain of 90 percent Bolsheviks and an outpost of 100 percent Bolshevism.¹ Seipel attacked the Soviet-style socialization measures of the Social Democrats and castigated the educational and cultural programs of the Austro-Marxists as unfruitful and damaging to the nation. On the next page, Reichspost editor Friedrich Funder continued Seipel’s assault, likening the socialist leaders in Vienna to an elephant in a china shop, destroying all the city’s good qualities.

The virulence of these attacks was nothing new; the choice of terminology was. For the first time in a major publication, the term Red Vienna was employed, pejoratively describing the municipal government and its socialist leadership. Previous epithets had focused on city hall and its radical, partisan policies—for example, city hall dictatorship, city hall Bolshevism, proletarian dictatorship, red city hall, class dictatorship, and tax and finance terrorism. In 1927 conservatives cast Vienna itself as a bastion of revolutionary socialism, a threat to the good people of Austria, and an enemy to the rest of the world. The Red Vienna strategy produced mixed results at best. The Social Democrats recorded their best showing of the First Republic, garnering 42.3 percent of the vote and seventy-one mandates in parliament, yet the Einheitsliste—which consisted primarily of the Christian Social and Greater German People’s Party but also included monarchist organizations and factions of the Austrian National Socialist Party—won the election and maintained control of the federal government.

Austrian politics took a radical turn in 1927; conservatives intensified their attacks on Red Vienna thereafter. On July 15, angry protesters set the Viennese Justizpalast ablaze after the acquittal of three right-wing paramilitary men on trial for the murder of two people in Schattendorf. In the ensuing chaos, the police opened fire on the crowd, killing eighty-nine people and injuring more than five hundred. The socialists condemned the action and called for a general strike and the resignation of the police chief. The country seemed on the verge of civil war, yet the Social Democratic leadership hesitated to engage in violence.² With the help of the fascist paramilitary organizations, known collectively as the Heimwehr, the government broke the general strike and restored order. Neither the police commissioner nor the police force faced recriminations for their violent actions. Seipel and the conservatives had recognized the reluctance of the socialists and stepped up their own violent assaults. This included increased pressure on Red Vienna. Seipel called for the introduction of true democracy—an authoritarian, one-party state—and advanced constitutional amendments that would strengthen the executive at the expense of parliament and the federal states. Austrian politics had begun its authoritarian turn, which culminated in successive fascist regimes—the Austrofascist Ständestaat between 1934 and 1938 and the Nazi state thereafter.

During this period of heightened tensions and emergent fascism, conservatives regularly deployed the term Red Vienna while socialists refrained from using it, fearing it would reinforce conservative claims that the core of the socialist project in Austria was Marxist, Bolshevik, Masonic, and Jewish. In 1929, Eduard Jehly, a Viennese Christian Social party member, wrote a pamphlet lamenting the ten-year anniversary of socialist rule in Vienna titled Zehn Jahre rotes Wien. The broadside enumerated a list of grievances against the municipal government, employing antisocialist and anti-Semitic tropes to account for the decline of the city.³ When the socialist city council member Robert Danneberg wrote a rebuttal, he avoided the term Red Vienna, referring instead to New Vienna. Austro-Marxists writers rarely used the red descriptor outside of party rallies, lest they conjure images of Bolshevism.⁴ The battle over the Red Vienna brand attested to the existence of powerful countervailing forces against the socialists in the city and across the nation.⁵ This book looks at the struggle for the intellectual soul of Vienna waged by the socialist and progressive reds against the hegemonic, conservative blacks.

Ironically, in the six decades since it was coined, the rubric Red Vienna has carried mostly positive connotations. This reflects a series of changed circumstances. Politically, socialists have controlled Vienna since World War II and the Red Vienna of the First Republic is seen as a glorious antecedent.⁶ The period’s cultural and intellectual achievements, inextricably linked to the interwar Austro-Marxist milieu, are today acknowledged as a golden age in the history of Austrian thought. Some of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers (for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Popper, and Hans Kelsen) were engaged with socialist projects, while others (Ludwig Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, and Eric Voegelin) challenged these initiatives. The brain drain that resulted from the persecution, emigration, and murder of the 1930s and 1940s transformed interwar Vienna into a second Austrian world of yesterday. This recoding began shortly after the destruction of the First Republic in 1933–34, when conservative forces defeated the socialists in the February civil war. The exiled socialist leadership defended their achievements in articles, books, and memoirs.⁷ Moreover, thousands of intellectuals, many of Jewish origins, emigrated between 1934 and the start of the Second World War. They reinforced this view, recollecting Vienna as a fortress or ghetto of cosmopolitan, progressive and even radical ideas.⁸ As the sociologist Marie Jahoda recalled, almost everyone with whom she interacted was a socialist or socialist sympathizer.⁹ Finally, since the 1960s scholars have been drawn to the currents of Red Vienna and Austro-Marxism; their extensive research has given us a robust understanding of the socialist sphere of influence.¹⁰

These developments have had two major consequences. First, interwar Vienna began to move out of the long shadow cast by its illustrious fin-de-siècle predecessor.¹¹ Studies of interwar Austrian movements in philosophy, psychology, economics, literature, and theater multiplied.¹² Scholars concluded that a thriving late Enlightenment, sociocultural milieu existed, consisting primarily of Jews, socialists, and liberals, which produced the hothouse culture of Red Vienna.¹³ According to this interpretation, this group dominated the Austrian cultural and intellectual landscape. The second consequence has been that ideas originating outside this milieu have received less attention. Although there are significant works on interwar Austrian conservatism and Catholicism,¹⁴ the role of conservative thinkers and their influence on intellectual debates in the capital have not been fully appreciated.¹⁵ This relative discounting of the conservative milieu has led scholars to underemphasize the extent of ideological conflict in interwar Viennese intellectual life.

This book addresses this shortcoming, arguing that one cannot begin to understand the richness of Red Vienna without its opposite number, Black Vienna. It reconstructs the origins and development of a Black Viennese oppositional field by elaborating its institutional and cultural evolution and by examining points of contact and conflict with Red Vienna. It shows that the overwhelming focus on a liberal Viennese political and intellectual heritage has downplayed the radicalism of authoritarian intellectual currents in the academy, press, civic associations, and government.¹⁶ By no means challenging the significance of the red cultural field—in fact, this book argues for new ways of appreciating the convictions of progressive intellectuals—this project argues for a revision of our understanding of Red Vienna that takes oppositional movements seriously. It adjusts the late Enlightenment image of Vienna by investigating the political and intellectual commitments of Viennese thinkers from across the cultural landscape. In light of the stiff resistance that Red Viennese intellectuals faced in their professional and political endeavors, their counterhegemonic achievements in philosophy, science, and social reform appear all the more impressive.

The inclusion of a Black Viennese cultural field also recasts the engagement of interwar Austrian intellectuals in a more radical, politicized light. It shows that the most significant ideas from the period did not develop independently of the political, social, and economic turmoil of the interwar years. Understanding Black Vienna and the struggle of intellectuals for hegemony helps us to better understand the impetus behind the rise of Austria’s two fascisms and the destruction of the First Republic.¹⁷ By engaging in intellectual and political projects in Austria and abroad, Viennese intellectuals participated in the debates over democracy, capitalism, anti-Semitism, and fascism that dominated European affairs. At stake for these intellectuals was not only scholarly impact but also political and social influence. Using relational and transnational models that stress similarities between different cultural organizations and across national boundaries,¹⁸ this book shows Vienna to be a crucible of European ideological debates and a microcosm of interwar historical developments.

What Was Black Vienna?

While the concept of Red Vienna has been well-defined, Black Vienna, has not been so clearly circumscribed. The term black itself possessed multiple valences in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Austria and Europe. Historically, black was the traditional color of the Austrian Christian Social party and European Political Catholicism, leading Ivo Andics to call the Vienna of Karl Lueger "schwarzes Wien."¹⁹ While Black Vienna centered on the right wing of the Christian Socials and radical Catholic priests and theologians, it represented more than a political orientation.²⁰ As Robert Pyrah rightly observes, interwar Viennese politics and culture did not map onto one another perfectly.²¹ This was particularly true of Viennese conservatism. Many writers and thinkers kept their distance from political parties and church-sponsored social movements even as they advocated for radical programs. The Social Democrats recognized the disjuncture between party politics and ideology, exploiting the complexity of blackness. In a 1932 campaign poster, Ho-ruck nach links, a red worker pushed a lever toward Rotes Österreich/Rotes Wien and away from Schwarzes Österreich. Lurking behind Black Austria was Hitler (in traditional Austrian Trachten).²² Black therefore implied fascism—both the Italian variety and Hitlerism. It could also allude to the German nationalism, or Pan-Germanism, of the Greater German People’s Party, the university fraternity the Deutsche Studentenschaft, or the social association the Antisemitenbund. Last, it could refer to the black and yellow colors of the Habsburgs and the monarchists, with their distinctive (Austrian) German nationalism. In short, Black and Black Vienna were rich symbolic complexes and represented a range of positions and phenomena.

While hardly monolithic, the Black Viennese cultural milieu was far more expansive and inclusive than traditional understandings of Austrian culture and politics have allowed. The ideas represented within its institutions ran a broad spectrum, yet its discourse centered on radical anti-Semitism, German nationalism, völkisch authoritarianism, anti-Enlightenment (and antimodernist) thinking, and corporatism. The potential for collaboration between Catholic conservatives and German nationalists has only in recent years begun to attract scholarly attention. As Julie Thorpe shows, both groups’ demonization of Jews and ethnic minorities, grounded in German nationalism, is particularly noteworthy.²³ Elke Seefried has revealed that ideas about a Central European German Reich united ethnic Germans of various political and social convictions.²⁴ While some Black Viennese thinkers supported the interwar republics of post-Versailles Europe, most rejected liberal democracy as a negative byproduct of the French Revolution and an import alien to German Mitteleuropa. They preferred authoritarian leadership under a strong führer and militated against the new order. Attached to this political vision were corporatist social and economic theories.²⁵ Taking their cue from nineteenth-century Catholic social theory and the Romantic political theories of Adam Müller, Friedrich Schlegel, and Joseph de Maistre, Black Viennese intellectuals advanced a radical program for overcoming capitalism and achieving organic social unity. These concepts defined the limits of Black Viennese discourse. While not everyone possessed the same understandings of these terms, all Black Viennese intellectuals expressed themselves using some definition of them.²⁶

The ideas that made up the Black Viennese platform had their origins in the late imperial period, gaining a broad following with the rise of the Christian Social and Pan-German movements. These subjects have been studied in discrete political and religious histories and biographies, yet they have not been approached as part of a thriving interwar ideological landscape. This situation results not solely from the enduring preference of contemporary historians and intellectuals for progressive ideas but also from the belief that the interwar period signified the eclipse of Black Vienna. In the 1880s and 1890s, German nationalists and Christian Socials had ridden a wave of mass politics, politics in a new key, to electoral success.²⁷ The growing appeal of the Christian Social party to the Viennese bourgeoisie and intelligentsia culminated in Karl Lueger’s mayoral victory in 1895, while Georg von Schönerer reanimated calls for a greater German Reich.²⁸ After fifteen years of growth, however, the Christian Socials lost ground with the broadening of the electorate in 1907 and Lueger’s death in 1910. After the Great War and the fall of the Habsburg Empire, they lost their mandate in Vienna. Meanwhile, German nationalists lost much of their support when Austria lost millions of Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian Germans to Czechoslovakia and Poland.²⁹

Nevertheless Black Vienna hardly lost its broader influence, especially in cultural and social organizations.³⁰ In popular academic societies (the Leo-Gesellschaft and Deutsche Studentenschaft), social organizations (Antisemitenbund, Österreichische Aktion), and intellectual weeklies (Neues Reich, Schönere Zukunft), Black Viennese intellectuals mobilized a growing constituency for their radical ideas. Writers, philosophers, priests, historians, scientists, and civil servants—representatives from all segments of the educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum)—made their voices heard. While conflicts often arose between individuals within the conservative cultural field, they were united in their antipathy to Red Vienna and the First Republic. Black Viennese intellectuals committed to a common program: defeating social democracy, replacing democratic, capitalist Austria, excluding Jews and foreigners, and restoring German and Austrian greatness. Only once these basic goals were achieved in the mid-1930s did major fissures emerge, for by that point there was no longer any place for moderate conservative positions. As the intellectual debates of the Austrofascist years reveal, the Ständestaat always stood on precarious ideological grounds in the battle between Austria’s two fascisms. Black Viennese thinkers generally wanted more radical solutions than the Austrofascists offered and militated for more expansive changes. In this way, the ideas of Black Vienna paved the way for the Austrofascist coup and the Anschluss.

The identification of a significant, relatively unified, and radical conservative Black Viennese field challenges the standard historiography of First Republic Austria. Dating to Adam Wandruszka’s seminal essay, historians have represented interwar Austrian politics, society, and culture using a three-camp (Lager) model: Christian Social-conservative, socialist, and (German) nationalist. Wandruszka characterized this division as stable throughout the First Republic; it was Austria’s natural or God-given division (natur- oder gottgewollten Dreiteilung Österreichs).³¹ This emphasis on difference over similarity, particularly between the Christian Social and German nationalist camps, stems primarily from a post-1945 tendency to exculpate non-Nazi conservatives and German nationalists of their pre-1938 misdeeds. As the Austrian victim myth goes, the shared suffering of Catholic conservatives and socialists at the hands of the Nazis in the concentration camps had created a common Austrian identity.³² A new emphasis on the two-part division of interwar Austrian life challenges the victim myth and situates this book within a growing body of literature that has investigated the discursive and cultural similarities across camps, particularly across the Catholic conservative and German nationalist divide.³³

Given the unity of the Black Viennese field, not only does the Lager model require correction, but interpretations of interwar Austrian identity that emphasize a culturally distinct (non-German) Austria also need revision.³⁴ The Catholic and national Lager split only after Austrians had developed their own radical—and fascist—conservatism. Austrian scholarship has stressed the antinationalist (and anti-German) sense of Austrian identity that evolved in the interwar years, yet this development took place only late in the First Republic, if at all.³⁵ The relative unity of Black Vienna highlights the ambiguities of Catholic views on race, nation, and state in interwar Europe.³⁶ Whereas Nazism represented a bridge too far for many Catholic intellectuals, their fascist predilections shone through in most of their discursive and political practices. Black Viennese intellectuals distanced themselves from the First Republic and its political parties, engaging in a radical politics of culture. They turned the city’s universities, schools, scholarly societies, and journals into ideological battlegrounds. Inviting radical participants from across Europe, they advanced debates on conservatism and fascism. Their ideas contributed mightily to the fascist turn of Austrian politics and culture. An investigation of the struggle for intellectual and political hegemony in Vienna provides a comparative, transnational example that complements recent work on the relationship between religion, politics, and ideology. Austria’s interwar new Right figured prominently in this Europe-wide turn and deserves a prominent place in the scholarship of these phenomena.³⁷

The Struggle for Hegemony and the Importance of Intellectuals in Interwar Europe

As an intellectual history of a city that was deeply divided culturally, socially, and politically, this book relies on Antonio Gramsci’s model of hegemony to help us better understand the dynamics of ideological conflict. Gramsci argues that effective control over the state and economy derives not only from the use of violence and coercive power but also from consent achieved in civil society. Representing the public sphere between the state and economy, civil society is where people engage with one another as private individuals. Controlling this space requires an ongoing struggle in educational, academic, cultural, and social affairs. For Gramsci, the key actors in the ideological conflict are intellectuals, broadly construed as any individuals who perform mental work as part of their social function. This includes traditional intellectuals (clerics, artists, bureaucrats, etc.) and organic ones, who represent the interests of their socioeconomic class. The latter group includes politicians and social activists. While politicians confront one another in contests for state control and intellectuals contend for academic and cultural preeminence, there is also constant overlap and interaction between these two fields: politicians strive to win intellectuals for their educational and social programs; intellectuals seek state support for their ideas. Therefore, for Gramsci, political and intellectual life are inextricably intertwined, with civil society serving as the central battleground for hegemonic control.³⁸

In interwar Vienna, this type of struggle for hegemony unfolded between black and red camps on the political and intellectual levels. As conservative and socialist politicians vied for parliamentary majorities nationally and within Vienna, educational, social, and cultural matters took center stage. Intellectuals became increasingly involved in these discussions, and politicians actively sought intellectual support for their ideologies. Heated debates raged across the political spectrum over the role and definition of intellectuals and intellectual workers. The question of intellectuals³⁹ addressed a broader segment of the Austrian populace than typically assumed. Meanwhile, intellectuals also faced off in academic societies, newspapers, and books as they pursued a limited number of academic and cultural appointments. In this way, political and intellectual struggles reinforced and enriched one another. Attracting intellectual supporters preoccupied politicians; intellectuals themselves recognized the need for political patronage. A dialectical relationship of intellectual engagement evolved. Political leaders recruited intellectuals through patronage structures. Intellectuals used these to combat ideological opponents and to build their respective visions of a better order. As Malachi Hacohen argues, there was no escaping politics in interwar Vienna.⁴⁰ In fact, most Viennese intellectuals did not seek an escape. They created engagé cultural fields to explore radical alternatives to the status quo. Karl Popper, Otto Neurath, Helene Deutsch, and others embraced not only socialism but also a transformative idea of revolutionism.⁴¹ They pressed their friends and colleagues to take up the radical cause against the metaphysical and theologizing tendencies of the country.⁴² In Black Vienna, Othmar Spann, Richard Kralik, and Joseph Eberle employed fighting science in support of their worldview. A closer examination of the dynamics of intellectual debate reveals the intimate interaction between politics, science, philosophy, and religion. Tracing the interactions and conflicts between intellectual groups sheds light on more general trends in Central European history. It tells the story of radicalizing and politicizing intellectual groups engaged in a European-wide struggle for ideological supremacy.

The use of the concept of hegemony forces us to recast our understanding of Viennese intellectual life in a more political fashion. The complex interplay between intellectual and political associations in interwar Vienna reveals that self-professed apolitical Viennese intellectuals, especially the conservatives, were hardly neutral bystanders during the Republic. Battles for intellectual hegemony dated to the late imperial period, when the Christian Socials and Social Democrats first began cultivating ties to Habsburg intellectuals over school reform, social policy, and electoral change.⁴³ Vienna quickly became a hotbed of intellectual activity, with intellectual circles springing up all over the city. Conceiving of postwar Vienna as a system of microcircuits, this work looks at the evolving cross-disciplinary and political engagements of intellectuals.⁴⁴ As Edward Timms notes, postwar Viennese circles created a vibrant counterculture, challenging the hegemony of conservative Austria.⁴⁵ This makes it all the more urgent to understand those forces that Red Viennese cultural movements countered. Doing so obliges us to take a fresh look at how cultural and political forms of capital were produced and accumulated.⁴⁶ This interdisciplinary history explores Vienna’s polarized intellectual life and the radicalization and politicization of its culture. In doing so, it argues for the importance of Vienna for our understanding of interwar European intellectual trends.

To achieve a relational understanding of cultural fields, red and black Viennese milieus are interpreted as dynamic, historically contingent constellations of thought, not as discrete, monolithic entities. Not only were intellectuals affected by historical events, but their ideas also shaped the world around them. In Red Vienna, intellectuals initially engaged passionately but eventually grew disillusioned with the Austro-Marxists as democracy and socialism failed to take root and radical conservatism gained in strength.⁴⁷ Red intellectuals fought a rearguard action against conservatives in the corridors of knowledge and power, producing remarkable scholarship yet failing to turn the intellectual tide. Nevertheless, black intellectuals felt threatened by the red counterculture and lamented the decline of Austrian values. While they reasserted their hegemony in Vienna and Austria, they dreamed of European influence, which eluded them. While most conservatives advocated for fascist solutions and celebrated the destruction of the First Republic, the Austrofascist state satisfied few. Black Viennese intellectuals continued to advocate for even more radical solutions. Ironically, the successful struggle for hegemony waged by the Blacks led to the collapse of the vibrant, hothouse culture of interwar Vienna and indirectly to the rise of Hitler.

Outline of the Book

The book advances chronologically through the years 1918–38, alternating between black and red chapters. Chapter 1 explores the evolution of Black Vienna in the early interwar years. Focusing on the Austrian Catholic scientific society, the Leo-Gesellschaft, and the most influential Central European conservative journal Das neue Reich, it examines how conservatives defined the concept of the intellectual and appealed to that class. It reveals that although interwar Vienna voted red, blacks maintained hegemony in intellectual and cultural life. Intellectuals, divided before the war over questions of German nationalism and the place of Catholicism in Austrian and German conservatism, came together to combat the socialism, Judaism, and capitalism of the First Republic. The Black Viennese field radicalized over time in response to worsening economic and political conditions. The successes of radicals like Das neue Reich editor Joseph Eberle showed the weakness of democratic and moderate ideologies in Austrian conservative thought and foreshadowed Austria’s fascist turn.

Chapter 2 looks at the recruitment efforts undertaken by the Austro-Marxists to win intellectual workers to the socialist cause in the early Republic. In the wake of the 1918 Austrian Revolution and their 1919 electoral victory, the Social Democrats believed they had an opportunity to win traditional, nonsocialist intellectuals with their social and economic policies. Over the next few years, socialists filled the pages of their theoretical journal Der Kampf with articles about intellectual work and recruited non-Marxist, progressive intellectuals to contribute to their movement. Despite the successful recruitment of progressive, Jewish, and free-floating intellectuals from outside the corridors of knowledge and power, the Austro-Marxists struggled to attract the broader intellectual class discussed above.

Chapter 3 explores the popularity of authoritarian and fascist ideas in Central Europe through an investigation of the one of the most influential Black Viennese circles, the Spannkreis, centered on the sociologist and philosopher Othmar Spann. Spann’s holistic ideology enjoyed widespread academic support in Austria, the Sudetenland, and parts of Germany. Never content with mere academic influence, Spann curried favor with radical political movements, including the Austrian Heimwehr, the Italian Fascists, and the Nazi Party. The robustness of Spann’s connections—both intellectual and political—demonstrates the close interaction between science and politics in interwar Central Europe. It also shows the relative unity of Viennese conservatives in a common front against Red Vienna.

One of the groups that challenged the Spannkreis was the Vienna Circle of logical empiricists. Chapter 4 examines the social activities of members of the Verein Ernst Mach (Ernst Mach Society), the public arm of the circle. It contests the claim of Moritz Schlick, one of the group’s founders, that the society was absolutely unpolitical by showing how its members engaged in social and political struggles in adult education and welfare centers and intellectual societies. The group brought together people from radical, antiestablishment organizations committed to the defeat of the hegemonic metaphysical and theologizing leanings of Black Vienna. The involvements of its members demonstrate that progressive science and philosophy had politicized and radicalized by the late 1920s in reaction to the continued conservative predominance in the academy and state.

Chapter 5 investigates the emergence of the monarchist movement the Österreichische Aktion, situating Viennese radical conservatism in the larger context of European authoritarianism and fascism. Traditionally portrayed as a moderate force in Austrian life, the Aktion in fact drew on the work of the proto-fascist Action Française and the Italian Fascists in crafting a new conservative movement. Despite its anti-Prussian and pro-Habsburg rhetoric, the group’s ideology reinforced notions of German supremacy in Central Europe that overlapped with other contemporary German nationalist and Catholic conservative views. Therefore the chapter calls into question traditional three-Lager interpretations of interwar Austrian culture by demonstrating the relative coherence of conservative thought through the 1930s.

Chapter 6 investigates the rise and fall of social and political engagement by progressive intellectuals in the face of Austria’s fascist turn in the late 1920s. The chapter argues that the intellectual work of Red Viennese men and women cannot be separated from their practical activities and must be understood against the backdrop of worsening political and economic conditions in Europe. Intellectuals initially believed the time was ripe for transformation and the social democratic movement provided the best means for realizing their intellectual and social goals. As the Austro-Marxists faced repeated setbacks in the late 1920s and 1930s, Red Viennese intellectuals became more critical and distant from the movement. The chapter challenges the idea that apolitical science existed in interwar Vienna, contending that disengaged thought became possible only after the decline of Austro-Marxism and the triumph of fascism.

The last chapter looks at the split within the Black Viennese camp and the triumph of its most radical members during the Austrofascist years. Focusing on the struggles between the radicals around Eberle and the more moderate thinkers around Dietrich Hildebrand, the chapter shows that most figures in the Black Viennese field had embarked on the road toward fascism and Anschluss by the early 1930s. Intellectuals thus paved the way for a Nazi takeover. This chapter and the conclusion examine the implications of the Black Viennese triumph on the First and Second Republics and on Austrian collective memory. These sections argue that the relative lack of attention to problematic aspects of interwar Viennese culture has contributed to a slow coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung).

1. Ignaz Seipel, Der Sieg der Einheitsliste, RP, April 24, 1927, 1. Translations mine unless otherwise noted.

2. Hanisch, Der große Illusionist, 240–54. On July 15, see Botz, Gewalt, 107–11; Gulick, Austria, 725–31, and Leser and Wlasits, 1927.

3. Jehly, Zehn Jahre rotes Wien.

4. Danneberg, Zehn Jahre neues Wien.

5. Siegfried Mattl, Die Marke ‘Rotes Wien,’ in Kos and Békési, Kampf um die Stadt, 54–63.

6. Today, the encyclopedia for the Viennese Social Democrats is located at http://www.dasrotewien.at; The Social Democratic history portal (http://www.rotes-wien.at) chronicles the achievements of interwar Vienna. The mayor of Vienna, Michael Häupl, proclaims his government to be the heirs of Red Vienna: 90 Jahre Rotes Wien ist nicht genug! (25 April 2009).

7. Mattl, ‘Rotes Wien,’ 54–63.

8. See the contributions in Leser, Das geistige Leben Wiens, especially the Symposion. See also Malachi Hacohen, Kosmopoliten, in Konrad and Maderthaner, Werden der Republik, 281–316. On Austrian emigration, see Stadler, Vertriebene Vernunft, and Ash and Söllner, Forced Migration.

9. Jahoda, Ich habe die Welt nicht verändert, 36. See also Symposion, in Leser, Das geistige Leben Wiens, 148–59.

10. On Austro-Marxism, see Leser, Zwischen Reformismus und Bolschewismus; Albers, Otto Bauer und der dritte Weg; Loew, Austro-Marxism; Glaser, Austromarxismus; Bottomore and Goode, Austro-Marxism. On the achievements of Red